On Friday, the ENVS 400 students, the thesis-writing seniors came and visited our class. We discussed Love Your Monsters kind of, but mostly we just talked about “the environment” and “environmentalism” and the Environmental Studies program at Lewis & Clark. Their comments and advice was both very interesting and informative, as well as very hopeful. […]

When we first attempted to define “environment” and when we watched Darwin’s Nightmare, we confronted the notion of “purity,”  this notion that things can be purely good or purely bad, purely economic or purely scientific, purely biological or purely cultural. I believe that purity is a gross reduction of the complex and interconnected world we […]

Capital “R” Romantic metaphors abound in the collection of essays Love Your Monsters, named for Bruno Latour’s allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr Frankenstein, obsessed with the acquisition of knowledge and the power of technology created a wretched being, which became an evil creature once it was abandoned by its creator. Likewise, humans have advanced […]

“My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty…” ~William Wordsworth, […]

When I was a junior in high school, I read an excerpt from a Wendell Berry essay all about limitlessness. Looking back, I’m almost positive that the excerpt was from Faustian Economics. Anyways, the argument of the essay was that Americans have this concept of the limitlessness of the land, of our resources. This perceived […]